Time to bring down the wall
It’s cold, it’s raining and I am enjoying my caffeine kick of the day while trying to plan my life for the next 24 hours. Among other important things, I suddenly remember I should go to the ‘other side’ and collect two Bolivian-style, woollen, hand-knitted caps I ordered from a Turkish Cypriot friend, married to a South American, for the children of another friend, who is Finnish and lives in Ireland. I am going to Dublin tomorrow and thought such ‘head-warmers’ would be suitable presents for two little girls growing up in a place that is wet and chilly most of the time. Also, such a purchase embodies my personal interpretation of the film I saw last weekend, Babel.
To cut it short, the film – that should really be entitled The Story of a Gun – is about globalisation, taking place in Morocco, Japan, Mexico and the US. My Bolivian caps could easily be used in a similar way. Just imagine: they are knitted by a Turkish Cypriot married to a Bolivian, bought by a Pole who lives in Nicosia and given to two half Irish, half Finnish kids from Dublin. Twenty years later one of the kids comes to Cyprus. The Cyprus problem is still unsolved and, thanks to global warming, Cypriot winters are much worse than they are now. The girl keeps on wearing her Bolivian cap to keep herself warm and also to hide her face when she crosses to the other side to play in casinos. Meanwhile, her parents, who are well-known globe-trotting academics, are on sabbatical leave in La Paz, while her sister, in Poland, falls in love with a Chinese man. She also wears her Bolivian cap because Polish winters are even worse than those in Cyprus. One day, the whole family (in Bolivia, Cyprus and Poland) disappears and the Chinese man comes to Nicosia to solve the mystery. All traces lead to the Turkish Cypriot lady who knitted the two caps 20 years earlier. By now she lives in Australia but her son still has her knitting tools.
The problem is that my scenario might never take place because today I am so swamped with things I have to do before I leave that I might never cross to the north. To be honest, I should have got the caps from Ayten (the lady who knitted them) on Saturday and it is already Tuesday, when I have to write my column, meet friends for lunch in Ledra Street, collect my digital camera from its branch of Germanos, deliver some pictures to the paper and also buy mascara at Debenhams. Of course, had the Ledra Street crossing been open walking a bit further down the road towards north Nicosia’s Bandabuliya where Ayten has her shop wouldn’t have hurt me. As a matter of fact, it would have been a ten-minute pleasant interval. But there is no such possibility and at present a simple escapade to the ‘other side’ takes much longer, whether by car through Ayios Dometios or on foot through the Ledra Palace. And the truth is, I am fed up with these two routes. Neither of them is particularly pretty, there is a problem with parking space at the Ledra Palace (but I am not saying that to make the Armenian Church open a parking lot in the old Armenian cemetery), plus both crossings are far from my usual wanderings.
However, since the discomfort of one Slav means nothing to people in high places, I will have to wait. For one side to agree to the demands of the other, for the other to decide that enough has been done, for the people of Nicosia to do a Kennedy-style “we are all Berliners”, for somebody reasonable to cut through all the absurdity and enable me to leisurely walk up Ledra Street, have an ice-cream at Papaphilipou, stop for coffee at Ayten’s, get some peeled prickly pears from a guy in front of Ayia Sophia, and then go back.
As a rule, I don’t sign petitions and am a politically passive animal but this time I have made an exception. There is a petition online to open Ledra Street written by my fellow columnist Haji Mike. It states: “We, the citizens of Nicosia-Cyprus, which is the last divided capital city in the world, demand that the wall that segregates Ledra Street is demolished. (…) Let’s Unite Ledra Street and make it true to its real name – Makri Dromos – Uzun Yol or The Long Road”. I have signed it. And I think you should as well. After all, Bolivian caps are worth it.
www.ipetitions.com/petition/unitledrastreet/
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